This Nov. 1, 2017, photo shows a van with windows covered with an assortment of stickers in Well, Fla. Federal authorities took Cesar Sayoc into custody on Friday, Oct. 26, 2018, and confiscated his van, which appears to be the same one, at an auto parts store in Plantation, Fla., in connection with the mail-bomb scare that has targeted prominent Democrats from coast to coast. (Courtesy of Lesley Abravanel via AP)

If they can never hurt me — if they are not sticks, nor stones — I do spend a lot of my life getting riled up by and about words. (Talking of sticks and stones, can you believe those French, um, yellow jackets trashing cop cars on the Champs d’Elysee? They were throwing sticks and stones harder than, sob, Yasiel Puig nailing a runner at third base. But I digress.)

When you are in the writing and editing dodge, words are your business. And, so, sure, I can get riled up about the state of the language in as ornery a fashion as any newsroom curmudgeon. But actually, among young people — young writers, at least — I think the words are in pretty good hands. They’re aces at the short stuff, the tweets, the instahs. And the permanent success of rap music, which I am supposed to call hip-hop and which I have not developed a deep fondness for, so that I will read December 10-best lists and go, “Wha?,” shows that the long form as well has not been lost.

As Fran Lebowitz wrote about 40 years ago, and I paraphrase: “Anyone who says the younger generation is illiterate hasn’t been reading their T-shirts.”

But the wordy thing that made me happiest in 2018 was the way that deranged pipe-bomber who was sending explosives by mail to everyone he perceived as anti-, shudder, President Trump was caught because he couldn’t spell. Two cheers for we English majors! (Not that they teach spelling in the English departments. To do so is classist. But they do teach it, or you learn it at any rate, in newsrooms, where class matters not.)

Cesar Sayoc, who lived in a van festooned with anti-CNN decals in Florida, was charged with sending 13 packages to the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Robert DeNiro after he was apprehended through sleuthing that involved his spelling “Lock-Her-Up” Hillary with one “l” instead of two. Along with a stray fingerprint, the FBI also nailed him on the basis of his multiple misspellings of the moniker Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, found both on the explosive packages — he used his botched version of the former Democratic Party boss’s name as a return address on several packages — and on a Twitter account linked to Sayoc.

Any copy editor in America coulda beat that rap. But not a guy who couldn’t spell.

Me, I would have had the juicing weightlifter arrested solely on the basis of the criminally sleeveless athletic shirts he wore to MAGA rallies, but maybe that’s not an offense in the Gunshine State.

Perhaps it’s a stretch to include in the etymological crimes of the year what someone I formerly thought of as an interesting public intellectual is reading. But author Alice Walker told The New York Times Book Review that one of the volumes currently on her nightstand is David Icke’s “And the Truth Shall Set You Free.” Icke is the crackpot Brit who has said that Jews on the one hand funded the Holocaust and that on the other hand maybe the Holocaust did not happen, among other insanities. Yet Icke’s books, Walker says, are “a curious person’s dream come true.” And this is a writer whose “The Color Purple” won the Pulitzer Prize?

Words matter, not just their spelling. But Walker is unrepentant in the wake of the interview, and so we should shun her the rest of her days.

The proper dust-up did get many of us to take a look at some of Icke’s thinking just to see how outrageous it is. So he’s got this other theory, along with his massive anti-Semitism: That shape-shifting, blood-drinking, child-sacrificing alien lizard people have taken power in the major capitals of our world.

And so, as even paranoids have enemies, even blind squirrels find a nut sometimes.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.